Maybe He Can Forget the Jokes

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — How do you take seriously a coach who looks like Woody Allen, sounds like Johnny Carson and acts like the class cut-up at the school picnic?

And he comes from a school where football isn’t a religion but comes in ahead of whatever is second to religion there?

You half expect Lou Holtz to be doing his shtick when his team gets to about the 10-yard line. To be asking the crowd, “Did you hear the one about . . . ?” Or, “How hot was it . . . ?” Or to get out the rubber bladder and seltzer bottle.

You look at Lou Holtz and you believe in leprechauns, all right.

But, I mean, this is the school--Notre Dame--of the sainted Rockne and the relentless Leahy. This is where the Four Horsemen rode, the Gipper died, the legends spawned. Pat O’Brien never played it for laughs. Neither did Ronald Reagan. What does Holtz think this is--a sitcom?

You get a mental image of the Hollywood agent calling the mogul. “Solly?! Solly, how’s the family? Let’s take lunch. Solly, have I got picture for you! A Woody Allen. Woody’s the coach of this funny little school up in Indiana, I forget what they call it--something French--or maybe it’s Swedish, I’m not too good on those Third World countries, in fact, I get the bends when I get east of Fairfax.

“Anyway, we got this great tradition, I mean, this school is like the cathedral of football and it’s all candlelight and organ music--19 guys with halos around their head and Ronald Reagan--and into this walks Woody and he doesn’t know a first down from a hormone and he thinks all these guys knocking each other down belong on a couch and he can’t believe it when he finds out the fullback can’t add and the linebacker doesn’t speak a written language.”

“I tell you, it’s socko stuff, Solly. Saturday night Live with Belushi with a sword, Inspector Clouseau at large in an investigation in the Vatican, Chaplin on a waxed dance floor, Hope on a troop ship.

“I see it as a bigger grosser than a grunt movie, Academy stuff, Solly. You’ll get the best tables on Melrose Avenue. You’ll have more Oscars than you have doors to stop them with, hoss!”

Those are the fantasies that come to mind when you see Lou Holtz in a coach’s cap with a whistle round his neck. A spoof, not a sport.

Watch him as he directs a game--if that’s the word--from the sidelines. He paces up and down like a guy looking for a collar-button, his eyes fixed on the ground. Only occasionally does he betray any interest in the goings-on in front of him.

It’s almost as if it has nothing to do with him. Who needs it? What Four Horsemen? Win one for the old who?!

But then you see his team and you know this isn’t the cast of a Woody Allen flick. More like 90 John Waynes, rangy, dangerous.

And that’s the fantasy Lou Holtz, not the real one. Underneath that skinny facade (and if he lost two more pounds you could mail him), Lou Holtz runs more to Woody Hayes than Woody Allen.

His football team stunned a Michigan team, which is used to winning openers, with a 26-7 walloping Saturday. That’s a Gipp-Rockne-Leahy count, and Lou Holtz is getting less funny by the day.

Actually, Lou Holtz has never been a candidate for the Borscht Belt. Losers need one-liners. Winners quote the Bible. But no one knows the X’s and O’s any better than Lou Holtz, who didn’t get the job because he puts people in mind of Don Knotts but more Don Shula.

Because he has coached at every level of the game, including the pros (New York Jets, 1976). He has proven he can coach kids who are weekend players--William & Mary, where he was assistant coach in 1961-1963 and liked to say, “I coached William, two other guys had Mary”--to Notre Dame, where his squad might be the Chicago Bears next year.

He was not about to make the world forget Rockne. “It was a boring game,” Holtz succinctly summed up the result for the press later. “But it was not an easy one. I told my players to check their low hole card and make sure they wanted to stay because Michigan was going to test them.”

If Michigan tested them, the scoreboard didn’t know it. But the Notre Dame team is itself a test for anybody up to and maybe including the Green Bay Packers.

The team that lost six games last year (two by one point, one by two points and two by five points) was rated in the top 20 by Sports Illustrated this season, prompting an infuriated Holtz to warn the editors they would get more credibility “if they put me in their swimsuit issue.”

So, Lou Holtz can get out of his “Say good night, Gracie” mold and start quoting Popes and five-star generals. He may not look like a coach, but Jack the Ripper probably didn’t look like a killer, either. Those guys are the most dangerous kind.

It’s a cinch Coach Holtz doesn’t put anybody in the NCAA in mind of Woody Allen. It’s pretty hard to get laughs at 26-7. To the rest of the coaching profession, Woody--er, Lou--Holtz is about as funny as a blocked punt.

In your own end zone.